Elon Musk says SpaceX is targeting a Starship launch with a Mechazilla tower booster catch in about 4-6 weeks.
The fourth (previous) launch had a simulated booster tower catch where the booster hovered over water.
The Mechazilla tower arms are about the size of the drone ship used to land and recover Falcon 9 boosters.
Aiming to try this in late July!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 15, 2024
If the boosters are recovered then 33 of the 39 Raptor engines used for Starship missions will be recovered. This will make The Starship about as reusable as the Falcon 9.
IF the Raptor engines are $500,000 each to make and the engines are half of the cost of the rocket, then recovering 33 engines would reduce the cost per test mission from $40 million per flight to $12 million.
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Getting the Superheavy back intact from an actual complete mission for detailed inspection will be a critical milestone for the next iteration. Same for Starship.
How so? Before now, most all launches didn’t bring back engines for inspection and yet they went on to become reliable (e.g. Atlas and Delta).
You can only glean what information your instrumentation can provide if you don’t have the physical article in front of you. Think about all of the extra things you can do like metal fatigue studies, detailed measurements of components, and depending on the state of iteration, possibly even reuse of some components to save money.